| Joined: | Mon Apr 2nd, 2012 |
| Location: | South Lakeland, UK |
| Posts: | 4066 |
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This was on a base model 2009 Mac mini with 4 GB RAM and a 160Gb 5400 rpm (slow) HD. I have no Idea what the limit might be, or where it starts to have an impact on performance but honestly, 1,800 D200 NEF's did not slow that Mac mini down. The only 'slow' bit was exporting to JPEG, which was probably reasonable considering the numbers involved.
The reason I tried it was because I had to visit every page to slightly adjust the crop position and to check for highlights and the very occasional blemish. Loading them all together made it a seamless experience, it took me a whole day to go through every page, probably 17Hrs plus breaks but I got stuck in and it flowed.
I used an early version of Sofortbilt to capture the images directly to a 'G' Technologies (Hitachi) RAID 0 Firewire 800 drive. I am still using that drive and it still performs well. Hence my suggestion to Tom. I have four more similar drives and they are all of a similar age. If an HD does eventually go down I will simply replace the disk. The enclosures are really well built, all aluminium with no plastic in sight.
I use the RAID drive as my main drive and simply plug it into whichever computer I am using that day, desktop or MBP. I don't keep any significant data on a computer internal drive, If I capture some images while away, such as the recent Little Tern images, I store them on the MBP until I get home then plug the RAID drive in and lift them off the computer drive. For the most part my computer drives run very light.
Normally I have Time Machine back up my Main Drive (the RAID) and my current desktop to one of two backup drives which I switch over every couple of weeks to an external location away from home.
I also have a stack of bare drives and a SATA dock which I use to make occasional backups of whole drives and to archive. I use Super Duper and CCC, Carbon Copy Cloner.
The main message here for Tom is that if he get's a good fast Firewire drive, he will probably improve the performance of his existing computers and have consistent data available to both of his Macs without clogging them with data. They will respond well to that. I suspect Tom is using USB external drives for backup, Firewire is much faster and more suitable.
My G drives USB speed is Write, 38Mb / Sec - Read, 39Mb / Sec.
The RAID Firewire 800 is Write, 64Mb / Sec - Read, 82Mb / Sec.
I won't even quote the internal drives
(they were even slower).Download and run this Tom, see what it says about your disk speeds...
http://www.xbench.com
I just ran X Bench on my i7 Mac mini. The RAID times are a bit down on last time but still respectable Perhaps there is some fragmentation now?
I append the results of the main standard internal drive, the G Tech RAID drive and a G Tech USB drive.
Attachment: Mac Mini i7 HD Benchmarks June 12.jpg (Downloaded 44 times)
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Robert.